Headlines:
BMO Expects Boost From Gelco Alliance
Bank of Montreal hopes a recent alliance with a prominent travel-expense management company will bring in customers for its corporate card.
Early this month its BMO ePurchasing Solutions announced that it had teamed up with Gelco Expense Management, a division of Gelco Information Network Inc. of Eden Prairie, Minn., to help companies automate travel-expense reporting and reimbursement for employees.
The bank already delivered reports for its corporate cardholders to some other travel-expense companies, including Concur Technologies Inc. and Necho Systems Corp., said Randy Ford, BMO ePurchasing's the managing director. But Gelco is "a preferred provider" whose computers are more thoroughly integrated with the bank's, he said.
Campbell Soup Co. has already begun using the BMO-Gelco service, he said last week.
Some companies began using purchasing cards eight years ago or more, Mr. Ford said, and their use is growing 15% to 20% annually in North America, primarily in the United States.
Many new users still start out charging only travel and entertainment on corporate cards, Mr. Ford said. The Gelco deal "puts us in a position where we can help them when they're ready." 
Commerce Is Sold On NetScreen Switch
Commerce Bancshares Inc. of Kansas City, Mo., says an in-house Internet security system has reduced costs and hassles.
In January the $13.6 billion-asset company went from an outsourced firewall system to self-contained appliances from NetScreen Technologies Inc.
The previous system, though 5 years old, was effective, executives said, but the cost was high and there was lots to do at the bank's end. Also, the provider, which it would not name on the record, was being sold, and Commerce did not want to deal with the uncertainty that would entail.
In addition, "the demand on our firewall was beginning to exceed our capacity," said assistant vice president Ted Combs, Commerce's manager of information security. The bank's use of the Internet was growing 20% a quarter, he said.
Commerce started looking for an appliance-based alternative - software embedded in a dedicated server - in mid-2002. "We wanted the ease of operation," Mr. Combs said. It chose NetScreen, of Sunnyvale, Calif., in the fourth quarter of that year after studying analyst rankings of vendors and reviewing several itself.
Since January, Commerce has been using two load-balanced NetScreen-500 firewall appliances at its Kansas City data center to monitor its Internet portal, and a third at its backup recovery location. It has now logged more than 7,200 hours of operation without rebooting.
"It's been very solid," Mr. Combs said. "We saved ourselves a significant amount of money on an annual basis." He would not say how much.
Not until Dec. 8 did NetScreen announce that Commerce was using its systems. "Commerce does not very often allow a vendor to use our name," said Tom Cook, the banking company's chief information officer and a senior vice president. "We let some time go by to be sure we had what we thought we had."
Commerce is also using Netscreen's IDP-100 for detecting and preventing intrusions. The unit has been running since March in monitoring mode, watching the patterns of activity on the network; it is to go "in line" soon to stop block attacks that get past the firewall, executives said.
Internet use is growing at Commerce for several reasons. "We're seeing more applications coming online that rely on the Internet," Mr. Cook said. Retail customers are doing more online banking, corporate clients are using the online treasury service more, and internal applications such as loan-origination systems call for credit bureau reports and the like over the Internet.
As a result, Mr. Cook said, the Internet security system is "a mission-critical component of the enterprise infrastructure."
